Websites offering online photo editing software promote online publishing and online transactions resulting in printed works, such as, a photobook. A media-based project creation utilizes photos, videos, audio-videos, pictures, and/or text. Text may be utilized to describe photos or events, such as, storylines. As used herein, the phrase “photobook” shall be synonymous with any type of media-based product. In one embodiment, a photobook may be printed on a canvas or photo quality paper and bound together as a book.
Generally, to create a photobook online, a user needs to select photos from a user-device, such as a laptop or mobile device. Once the photos are selected, the photos are uploaded to a server. The server then provides essential tools to the user-device to build and customize the photobook. However, uploading a plurality of images of large sizes, but quickly providing essential tools to a user to build a photobook, is an unsolved problem not addressed by prior art solutions or products. A significant reduction in time for upload is necessary so that a user may get a pleasant experience in being able to quickly build and order a photobook, without needing first to wait for the images of large size to upload to a server and then only start customizing the book. One prior art photo uploading method teaches that a user must wait for an upload to take place before customizing the book, in which the wait is burdensome and distracting to the user, significantly degrading user experience. Further, users may decide at any point in the upload process to cancel the upload by exiting the product, hence resulting in no sale for the service provider. Prior art products have not been able to resolve the issue of reducing a total time it takes to build a photobook when too many images of large sizes are involved in an upload.
Currently, commercially available online vendors, such as SHUTTERFLY™ [www.shutterfly.com], SNAPFISH™ [www.snapfish.com], PICABOO™ [www.picaboo.com], CLUSTER™ [www.cluster.co], and so on, have not been able to resolve the aforementioned issues in creating a photobook.
For example, SHUTTERFLY™ uploads original images, and does not send smaller media files first. In SHUTTERFLY™, when a user goes to create a book, the user selects a set of photos from their harddrive. Until these photos are uploaded, the application uses the original photos from the harddrive directly to populate the book. This is inefficient for memory consumption and ultimately the process must swap out the photos later on. By tracing the server calls SHUTTERFLY™ is making related to photo uploading, one can clearly see that they are first uploading the original photos before they are subsequently asking for thumbnails from the server. One can see first that SHUTTERFLY™ is making 4 upload calls when uploading 4 original images. These represent the 4 original images from the collection of photos selected by the user, and do not include any other images uploaded. By tracking one photo, one can see that the upload to SHUTTERFLY's™ servers was for the entire original photo. One can see this if one examines the amount of bytes uploaded for a photo uploaded. After the original is uploaded and smaller versions of the original are made on their server, one can see the calls to retrieve the new smaller images from the server. These photos are smaller in size and the first retrieval for smaller photos happens after a few photos are first uploaded. In other words, one will not see calls to their image retrieval service before first seeing calls to their image uploading service.
In SNAPFISH™, the application gives two options, thus demonstrating that they either compress the image to upload a smaller size (without uploading the original) or upload originals for larger prints. From their website, a user is given two options: “A. Fast upload (recommended): This is the fastest way to upload your photos. If you want to order prints or turn your photos into most photo gifts, including mugs, cards, collages, books, and calendars, fast upload is the ideal choice.” and “B. Large print upload: Use this option only if you want to make posters and large photo gifts that require photos larger than 1650×1200. The size photo you'll need depends on which product you create. Your upload may be slower with this option.” For option A, they stress that option is for “prints” or smaller photo products (i.e., mugs, cards, etc.). This is because the original is never uploaded in this process. For option B, they emphasize that “Your upload may be slower with this option.” This is because they are blocking the experience of creating the product while the original photos are upload. This results in the ability to make larger prints, but at the expense of having to make the user wait for their originals to finish uploading.
In PICABOO, the editor uses images from the hard drive. No uploads occur during this process. When the user goes to order, then the user is instructed to wait while the original photos upload. When the user finishes their book and tries to order, they are met with a photo uploading bar. This bar tracks the photo uploading that occurs. This is the first time that any user photo is uploaded to PICABOO's servers. The photos that upload in this case are the actual original sizes.
The other prior art media-creation services suffer similar, or somewhat similar, limitations. Because of the aforementioned issues in customizing and printing a photobook through a web application or electronic commerce application, customer or user experience in creating and ordering a photobook is still inefficient. Similar problems exist when attempting to create video or other media-type products which rely on large original file sizes.